On 31 May, Nasa announced that its hotly anticipated solar probe mission was to be renamed in honour of astrophysicist professor Eugene Parker. A world first – no living person has ever had the honour of having a Nasa mission named after them – the gesture honoured Parker’s breakthrough work on high-speed solar wind. But what is solar wind? What are spacecraft like Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) hoping to find out? And what are some of the challenges ahead?

To explore all this and more, Nicola Davis speaks with Dr Nicky Fox, the Nasa mission’s project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who explains some of the challenges associated with this kind of mission. We also hear from Imperial College London’s Helen O’Brien, a member of the European Space Agency’s own Solar Orbiter spacecraft mission, which is scheduled to launch shortly after Nasa’s PSP in 2018.